Ctrl+backspaces creates a small box instead of erases

Question

When i press ctrl+backspace i some times get a small square inserted instead of the entire word erased. I tried to copy it here but it doesn't look this way in the textbox, it's just a plain white rectangle with a 1px black border.



It only happens in some text-boxes, in some it works like it should.

startmenu searchbox: works
notepad: doesn't work
notepad2: works
firefox: works

Running win7 x64

Answer 1

The "box" you're seeing is what is known as a control character. The box is displayed because, as you've discovered, not all programs handle the ctrl+backspace to remove a word.

This control character is one of 33 "non-printing" characters in the 128 character ASCII character-encoding scheme.

Answer 2

Not all applications handle keyboard shortcuts the same. Notepad doesn't seem to handle this key combination and handles it in its own way.

Answer 3

Found this on an MSDN blog...

A few people in the early days of the Internet Explorer group used the Brief editor, which uses Ctrl+Backspace as the shortcut key to delete the previous word, and they liked it so much that one of them added it to the autocomplete handler. Therefore, any edit control that uses SHAutoComplete will gain this secret Ctrl+Backspace hotkey.

So it sounds like if the application does not use SHAutoComplete it will not support the feature unless it has been explicitly added by the application's author.

P.S. control-delete removes the word ahead of the cursor